High On Life
by Laryna6
Summary: Movieverse. Speed's a brilliant engineer and athlete. He could have such brilliant futures ahead of him, but "your son seems to be interested in only one thing."


Disclaimer: I don't own Speed Racer, the movie or any other variety.

This is in ~movie continuity, covering the years we don't see to a degree. Most of my Speed Racer stuff (one of which is only on lj…) is set in a 'verse that explores what the 60s ethos + high tech actually means to a culture, including the sexual and drug use mores of that culture.

And then there's that LSD can cause flashbacks even years later, and thus a racer would have to avoid it like the plague since seeing the pretty colors = crash…

In any case, this was done to cheer up the glorious crack muse Nemi. It's just a little snippet, with an outside view that I hope shows what an amazing family unit/life Speed has. True story one of my cousins was saying another cousin was an idiot for going to work in forestry, camping and so on-type things right out of high school instead of going to college. Someone else pointed out that the woodsy cousin was doing exactly what he loved and had a plan that college would actually be detrimental to (the debt), while the cousin that had spoken had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and was going solely to get academic credentials and try to figure something out.

That kind of shut him down.

But yeah, people do have trouble seeing outside their own ideas of how life works, and Speed's life is a charmed one.

I'm trying to get back to writing… We'll see how it goes.

-

Elementary school was only rendered bearable by the presence of Trixie, but once he was old enough to recognize the need to study so he could graduate and get it over with he entered middle school and high school.

There, he had the opposite problems.

Speed was a Racer, and that meant a lot of things. It meant being an engineer, a physicist, a chemist, an athlete…

After his first PE class every single coach at his high school spent the rest of his time there trying to recruit him. The trouble was that he had a sport, and he loved it, even though Pops was swayed by the wrestling coach's pleas and Speed did show up for meets, at least, and practice when he had the time.

His memory was encyclopedic when it came to details of history and terminology that he actually cared about. His teachers kept saying that if only he applied himself he could get into a good college, an Ivy League one, even.

That he had to think about his future. Well, he had. Years ago. He knew what he wanted to do and was going to do it. He didn't need formal training in mechanical, electrical and so on engineering when he already knew it, had learned it at his parents' knees. College for him would be a waste of time, not a step on his personal road to success.

He raced through his homework and would crunch the numbers in his head for exactly how well he needed to do to pass, how much of the homework he needed to turn in, and not really do anything more. It wasn't laziness, they soon all knew, it was application… Just not to something that academics valued. He took college level science and math courses because he already knew the material and could actually point out his teachers' errors on occasion. He took them to _coast. _

For teachers a brilliant student is a treasure, a relief from having to teach hundreds of people who don't care and can't grasp even the easiest things, and they were incredibly frustrated that Speed refused to be _their _student. He wasn't rude about it, and it would have been better if he was, they could have written him off as a lost cause, yet another jerk who didn't deserve mentoring. He was brilliant, nice, geeky as so many of them had been once upon a time, the time they would have killed for a mentor like themselves.

But Speed already had mentors, had a family and friends who understood him, had it all worked out.

But a sport?

The science teachers didn't understand how he could possibly enjoy a sport and the sports coaches didn't understand how he could possibly find reading books with big words in the titles more fun than hanging out with the team, winning trophies, impressing girls.

Speed already had a girl.

He could have been a brilliant doctor or lawyer. He could have been a star basketball or football player.

Instead he was addicted to racing, this weird hybrid of both.

"It's like he's addicted to it," Coach Sanderson, who had lost far too many possibilities to steroids and partying, remarked glumly during break.

"Adrenaline is addictive. There are other chemicals produced by physical exertion that kill pain and so on." That was the Chemistry teacher's only possible explanation for how people could possibly enjoy any sport: they had to be on drugs. "Not to mention…" Endorphins, serotonin… "Hey, Princess. Wasn't he diagnosed with ADHD?"

The principal ignored the nickname as usual. "Yes, although I haven't seen any signs of it." She'd tried guidance counseling the boy. It hadn't worked.

"He can be hyperactive," pencil racing across the page, "he's much less so when there's been a race recently." The English teacher thanked her lucky stars: he was so much more manageable after them.

That prompted a nod from the biochem major. "His name's appropriate. On a biochemical level, his hobby," that was all he'd dignify it with, "would create the effects state that 'speed' tries and fails to mimic." It wasn't recreational chemistry when self-medication with various 'performance enhancers' was the key to surviving your university's accelerated 'crash and burn' premed program. He'd opted out before he ended up a patient instead of a doctor. "A natural high, leading to high performance.


End file.
